Studio: international art (57.1913)

Studio-Talk

“a cotswold holiday” (New English Art Club) by Charles m. gere

ipoetry in industrialism, and his emotional assertions
are profoundly satisfying when the emotional
impulses which sustained achievement even in
such a master as Rembrandt, for instance, are
challenged as to their right of expression in the
graphic arts by the theorists of Post-Impressionism,
who purport to offer us something so much more
within the province of art in their place. In
his exhibition Mr. Pennell included the famous
Panama series of lithographs, of which some
examples have already appeared in these pages, and
others from Rome, Spain, Chicago, Belgium, the
Yosemite Valley and California in America, and
England—notably the English manufacturing towns.
Sometimes it is the mass of an immense cliff, at
other times the great sweep of a modern bridge, or
again a huge pile of modern masonry, but in all cases
the artist contrasts with the energy and immensity
of nature the still more feverish energy of man and
the infinite subtlety of his invention. Mr. Pennell’s
lithographs present a picture of a great war going
on all over the modern world, of beauty in a new
shape warring upon beauty in the old.

The Camden Town Group, holding their third
exhibition in December at the Carfax Gallery, have
receded rather than advanced as an artistic society
since their previous exhibitions. It is not very
difficult to simplify nature’s colours into the vivid
flat colours which poster-artists rightly affect. This

sort of thing is often very interestingly achieved, and
there are instances of this in the present exhibition.
But there is nothing in this procedure to call for
that solemnity of pose which is characteristic of the
exhibitors in the Camden Town exhibitions. We
prefer Mr. J. B. Manson’s virility, and sometimes
charm, and Mr. Spencer F. Gore’s unconscious
poetry in landscape to the pattern-making pure and
simple of Mr. Ginnerand Mr. Drummond, for in the
case of neither of these latter artists are the patterns
always good—and when they are not that, we are
bound to ask what else of value they are. Mr.
Wyndham Lewis’s Danse might, perhaps, be in-
teresting were we in possession of the theory
explaining the absence of all resemblance to any-
thing in the nature of dancing figures; without
that key the title of his work merely indicates a
picture-puzzle—something which we hope, in spite
of every effort of the l’ost-Impressionist school to
the contrary, will always be rated in this country
below' a picture. We are in saner regions with the
art of Messrs. H. Lamb, R. P. Bevan, IV. Ratcliffe,
and Walter Sickert. The last-named artist has an
uncanny gift in the interpretation of a depressing
atmosphere, moral and physical, and in painting
his touch is infinitely less sensitive than in his
drawings, in which the brilliance of the execution
enlivens the greyest themes.

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